What’s So Damn Important Anyway?

According to one survey, the average American “consumer” spends 2 hrs 38 mins on his or her smartphone and tablet per day. If you think that time is spent working and moving the wheels of progress forward, you’d be wrong. 80% of that time is spent inside apps, with games and Facebook making up the bulk of the app time–50 and 30 of total minutes respectively. The other 20% is spent on mobile web browsers. And as much flack as it tends to get, email makes up a mere three minutes of the daily total (no figure is given for time spent speaking to others on the phone, though we imagine it’s a similarly small amount).

The above video gives a great illustration of what a world looks like when people spend 2:30 hours+ on their smartphones. It’s a world of distractedness, extraneous documentation and general lack of presence. For many of us, it is our world.

Today, before we reach for our smartphones, before we interrupt our conversations, before we take a picture or video to “save” a moment, before we check in with our friends on Facebook or fly with Angry Birds, we might ask ourselves, “is what is on my smartphone or tablet more important than what’s in front of me?”